Technologies associated with the communication of information have evolved rapidly over the last several decades. Television, cellular telephony, the Internet and optical communication techniques (to name just a few things) combine to inundate consumers with available information and entertainment options. Taking television as an example, the last three decades have seen the introduction of cable television service, satellite television service, pay-per-view movies and video-on-demand. Whereas television viewers of the 1960s could typically receive perhaps four or five over-the-air TV channels on their television sets, today's TV watchers have the opportunity to select from hundreds, thousands, and potentially millions of channels of shows and information. Video-on-demand technology, currently used primarily in hotels and the like, provides the potential for in-home entertainment selection from among thousands of movie titles.
As technology continues to move forward, both the control systems and the physical pipelines for delivering information have improved to the point that service providers are delivering more services to more platforms. For example, audio and visual media can be delivered to phones, movies can be streamed from a server to computer or television for viewing over the Internet and other communication networks, and interactive requests can be sent from individual users over various devices for a variety of services, e.g., purchases via credit card and polling information. Some of these new options have led people to rethink business models when using the Internet and/or other networks for delivering services. For example, there is a growing movement from more traditional Internet business models, e.g., models that rely upon publishing, to those that use a newer philosophy such as, for example, participation models. One way to describe the differences between these models is to consider that publishing models generally rely upon internal resources for all of the database/knowledge filling associated with the service offering, whereas participation models allow a company to rely upon the users for all or parts of the database/knowledge filling associated with the service offering, which can in turn be used for revenue generation.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide new methods, devices and systems for delivering media content to users which may take into consideration such paradigm shifts.